The start of an exciting journey! Last Monday, I began my much anticipated Practicum with Little Mountain Animation. I’ve been working alongside Nathan Thomas, Founder and extremely talented VFX animator (I don’t know how I got so lucky). After some discussion, we decided that our goal for this Practicum would be to create an episode of their animated short series, Big Dinosaur. I’ve had very little experience working with 3D and animation, so I’m a bit nervous that I won’t be able to contribute much, but it’ll be valuable knowledge to gain nonetheless. This week, we worked together on ideation and writing (I also watched a LOT of tutorials on storyboarding and 3D animation). Our next meeting was for pitching ideas; I came up with a slide deck with 20-30 ideas, some more fleshed out than others, and we narrowed down the list to 3 potential episodes. Some of the others were scratched because they’d require additional assets that we wouldn’t have the time or resources to build (ie. one of the ideas had a cat, but they don’t have a cat model ready and rendering fur in that short time would be difficult). After that, we ideated some more and then wrote fleshed out scripts for each of the ideas. I’ve been working on sketches, scenes and figuring out the story beats as well. During week two, we will likely begin working on storyboarding and some more editing of the script. From there… animation! I think.

Overall, Nathan has been a pleasure to work with and extremely accommodating. He wants me to get the most out of my practicum experience by letting me work alongside him for the entire process. I can’t wait to learn more!

In all the excitement, I forgot to take photos of my workspace or anything like that, so I’ll be sure to do more of that this week!